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Ad Code: 2
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from Auction House Records.
Seated Figure with Pink Background
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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Biography from AskART:
| Nathan Oliveira was born in Oakland, California to parents of Portuguese descent. As a youth he was interested in art and music, and considered the possibility of becoming a coronetist in a jazz band. However, during his high school years he visited the California Palace of the Legion of Honor where he saw a Rembrandt painting that profoundly influenced the course of his life. For a time he attempted to study advertising art before enrolling in the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland with the intention of pursuing a career as a portrait painter.
During the course of his college studies he began to move from portraits to a more expressionistic and non specific figuration. Despite the shift to a more abstract mode of expression, Oliveira's work has always remained tied to recognizable content rather than pure abstraction. He felt it was important to make something out of this abstract language, concrete images in which one can believe.
Oliveira graduated in 1951, then stayed to earn a Masters of Fine Arts Degree and to teach printmaking before being drafted into the Army. Completing his stint in the Army, Oliveira returned to Oakland to begin teaching and serving as head of the graphic arts department at the California School of Fine Arts. He began to achieve recognition and awards with several foundation fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1958, and the inclusion of his work in the 1959 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, 'New Images of Man'.
Then, after an intensely productive five-year period, he suffered growing doubt and inability to work. Despite this fallow period, his work continued to receive public recognition and he was invited to join the faculty at Stanford University to teach painting and printmaking. Throughout his career, Oliveira has been involved in printmaking, producing lithographs and monotypes, ever since his undergraduate days. Eventually working through the period of self-doubt, he started over again with a steady acceleration of output.
In the seventies Oliveira's work moved away from figurative work to abstractions and then to the 'site' paintings of the eighties. More recently, he has returned to painting the figure, using a live model instead of deriving images from his imagination as he had done in the past.
He has exhibited widely including 1984. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, "Places Without Location: The Paintings if Nathan Oliveira".
Source:
Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, University Nebraska-Lincoln website:
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Nathan Oliveira is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
California Painters
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